Walter Mosley - Fearless Jones

I went through every gritty, chocolate-stained file but came up empty. No Lily or secret apartment to be found.

I had to jimmy the file drawer on Minor’s desk. At first I was surprised that the boss would have taken the uglier piece of furniture for himself, but then I realized that it was for the enhanced security. I wouldn’t have bothered at all except that I had a notion.

Minor’s lower drawers had more policies. These also listed Morris Greenspan as the agent. Rodin, Kandinsky, Picasso were but a few of the names that I recognized from the cheap art picture paperbacks I sold in my store. Policies ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The owners were people from around the world. I sifted among the files and folders until I came upon a policy for a set of jewelers’ tools. I took Sol’s newspaper clipping from my wallet and checked it against the last entry on the documentation section — the dates coincided with the auction that caught Sol’s attention. The sale was brokered by Lawson and Widlow, the accounting firm Sol had worked for. Ten or eleven other policies had Lawson and Widlow mentioned one way or another; brokers, gallery representatives, collateral holders.

There was fraud in there somewhere, I was certain of that; not that I cared. All I wanted was the cost to set up a new bookstore. The rest they, whoever they were, could keep.

I knew that Minor had something to do with the bond; that’s why he came to see Fanny. Or maybe he knew that Fanny was dead and he intended to search the house personally. There was nothing about it in his desk. The only connection I could make to Sol and Fanny were Lawson and Widlow, the article that Sol had clipped, and the fact that Morris Greenspan coincidentally worked for Minor.

The putz, as Fanny called him, wasn’t there, but I didn’t expect that. The way I figured it he was at Lily’s house unleashing his laments upon her bosom. The only reasons I helped Gella were that I hoped she could get me closer to the bond and to keep Fearless from getting distracted. It would have been good to have found an address or number for Lily. That way I might have had some leverage over Morris; maybe I could have even turned him against Minor.

Then a thought hit me. Most of the time a married man taps on a woman he has easy access to. Wedlock keeps him from going out every night prowling the bars and nightclubs; he meets his girlfriends at work or next door. Maybe Lily works on the third floor, I thought. Maybe that light up there is them.

LIGHT FROM a single bulb spilled out from the crack into the gloomy hallway. To my disappointment the word JANITOR was stenciled on the red-brown door. There was no sound coming from anywhere.

I pulled the door open, expecting to see a deep-basined sink and a worn-out collection of mops and brooms.

I wondered how long he knew about the exposed beam that ran across the ceiling of the third-floor hopper room; the perfect timber to hold the rope firmly.

His face was darker than mine, and his inelegant hands were now stiff from the onset of rigor mortis. His skin was room temperature. The pants were unzipped and his grayish pink penis poked out. Morris looked as uncomfortable in death as he had in life. Under his feet was an overturned step ladder he had used to reach up with the rope and then kicked away to end his life. In the corner was a dwindling puddle that had the strong stench of urine. In the opposite corner was a cream-colored envelope that, I found, held the suicide note.

A few weeks later, when I was taking a forced vacation, it came to me that the piss in the corner was Morris’s last act of sloppy rebellion, the comment that summed up his life and then evaporated. The suicide letter was just a footnote to that metaphor.

I squatted down outside of the janitor’s door and read the five sheets of small, surprisingly neat, print. Then I read it again. The words were craftily penned, but the mind that wrote them was still a mess.

Morris was filled with fears and hallucinations, delusions of grandeur and deep self-hatred. His girlfriend, it seemed, was a prostitute, his dreams empty and pitiful.

I’m a fast reader, so I read the letter a third time and then put it in my pocket. I went all the way down to the front door and then stopped. Ever since Elana had come into my store I had been making the wrong decisions, going in the wrong direction. Therefore my next choice had to be considered. What would I say to Gella Greenspan? If I told her about her husband, she would want to call a hospital, and they would call the police. The police would want to know her movements that night, and those movements included me. Simon Jonas would be happy to press charges of assault, and if I didn’t ditch the pistol, they’d also have me on theft. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell her, it would be up to strangers, cold-hearted cops who’d just as likely accuse her of some crime connected to the idiot’s demise.

Pat Boone was fumbling a note when I opened the door to the car. Gella was asleep in the passenger’s seat. The sound startled her, but when she saw my face she smiled.

“Did you find anything?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

31

FEARLESS AND DORTHEA were asleep in the bedroom when I got back to our apartment at a little past five. I’d dropped Gella off at her place twenty minutes earlier. When we neared her house she worried that maybe Morris came home while she was gone and that he’d be worried about her. I kept my silence, telling myself that it would be less painful this way.

“Paris?” Fearless said from the bed.

“What time is it?” Dorthea groaned.

“Go back to sleep,” Fearless told her.

He threw on his clothes and met me in the kitchen of our little unit. I breathed Morris’s suicide in a whisper. It wasn’t until we got in the car and were driving that I told him the rest.

“And you didn’t tell her that her husband was upstairs,” he said, “dead?”

“I told you, man. It was nighttime, and they had already called her about Sol. And the dude was stone-cold dead. She couldn’t’a helped him. How would it have been good for her to see the husband she loved with his neck stretched out a foot long on a hemp rope, his dick stuck out, and his piss all over the floor?”

“I don’t know about all that,” Fearless chided, “and neither do you. All I know is that a man’s wife deserves to know when he’s dead.”

“He left a suicide note too,” I said.

“He did?”

“Yeah. I took it.”

“Now why you wanna do that?”

“’Cause sometimes I must think that I’m you,” I said.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“First off, he wrote it to a prostitute named Lily. The whole thing was written to her.”

“Girlfriend?”

“By the hour,” I said. “And that ain’t all. Morris the one killed Fanny.”

“No.” Fearless turned to me in wonder.

“Morris wrote it down that he told her on the drive over to her house that the man he had been working for, Zev Minor, a man she had never met, was actually a guy named Zimmerman. He was feeling guilty over what happened to Sol and scared about what might happen still. Fanny went a little crazy when Morris told her that. She screamed at him and yelled at him and said that she was going to raise hell. He dropped her off and then got scared. He said that he went to his car and then came back to knock on the door, but she wouldn’t let him in.

“And then he went around to the back to kill her?” Fearless asked.

“No. At least he said it was just to talk her out of going to the police. It seems that the policies that Minor had been writing weren’t exactly legal and Morris was listed as the agent for all of them. He said that he went to the back door, but she wouldn’t let him in. Then she said she was calling the police. When he saw her pick up the phone he went crazy. He broke the window in with a rock. After that he said that he didn’t remember anything until he came back when we were there.”